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Podcast suite Odeo goes up for sale

Web-based podcasting application Odeo has been put up for sale, just months after founder Evan Williams led a management buy-out of the project from investors.

Williams wrote: “We’ve put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we’re not improving it fast enough.”

Williams, who also co-founded original Blogger developer Pyra Labs, launched Odeo in summer 2005, making it easier for people to produce audio podcasts.

The site services a sizeable proportion of the web’s in-page audio clips – Williams reported 1,523,963 plays of Odeo’s embedded Flash player last month.

But after struggling to make the service stick and aiming to revert to a more experimental startup, Williams and partners founded a new company, Obvious Corp, to buy the site back from financial backers in October.

Meanwhile, Obvious has launched mobile messaging and presence service Twitter.

“It seems likely Odeo is worth more to someone else than it is to us at this point, so we’re looking for a new home for it.

“We’ve been having some conversations with potential buyers, and this is our attempt to put the word out more widely in the most expeditious way (and without involving investment bankers and the like).

“Our main concern is the ability to focus on Twitter and to see Odeo live on in some legitimate form.”

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